Year in Review: 2014

Now 14 years into a new millennium, the year jerked us back to a past we thought we’d left behind: Beheadings, race riots, Soviet-style conflict, and runaway epidemics. In the subterranean reaches of ancient churches in Mosul, Iraq — turned suddenly and in broad daylight to ISIS shrines — the captives of the 21st century met an abyss of medieval-minded militants and the unenlightened dawn of a new dark age.  The year turned on regifting. Like the stiff-necked aunt who keeps handing out fruitcake after all the relatives say, “Enough!” 2014 gave us ample taste of old and familiar history […]

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Samaritan’s Purse worker “physically strong” despite 90-day ordeal

Militants released Samaritan’s Purse aid worker Flavia Wagner Aug. 30, but conditions in the Darfur region of Sudan where she was abducted continue to be “highly insecure,” according to one aid specialist. Even as Wagner, who was kidnapped in South Darfur more than three months ago, arrived on the morning of Aug. 30 at the airport in Nyala, the regional capital, three members of a Russian helicopter crew were abducted from the same area while traveling in a minibus. Since the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for war crimes and crimes against […]

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